Kyle Taylor

“What a great burden of guilt men have! Samuel said to Adam, and you have tried to take it all.”

I think there is a very solid chance that, in time, this becomes my favorite book I have read, as its complexities have found me at the perfect time. Ste

“What a great burden of guilt men have! Samuel said to Adam, and you have tried to take it all.”

I think there is a very solid chance that, in time, this becomes my favorite book I have read, as its complexities have found me at the perfect time. Steinbeck’s prose takes this multi-generational family drama to biblical levels. When I hear common contenders for “The Great American Novel” I usually hear Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, which now having read this shocks me. East of Eden may not only be the Great American Novel, but one of the Great Novels period. Upset that it took me 21 years of my life to get to this, but I feel like it hit me harder because I did. Not sure that I have ever felt that what I was reading and feeling was this important.

I don't very much believe in blood,” said Samuel. “I think when a man finds good or bad in his children he is seeing only what he planted in them after they cleared the womb.” “You can't make a race horse of a pig.” “No,” said Samuel, “but you can make a very fast pig. A war always comes to someone else.

East of Eden has so much to say and as I was approaching the end, I wasn’t sure if it had enough time to say all of it. Yet those last 7 or so chapters masterfully wrap everything up into one word and I believe Samuel or Lee described it as the single greatest word in the history of mankind. Timshell – Thou Mayest. We are not what we are told, we are what we choose.

“I don't have to be you. I just know. It just came to me whole. If I'm mean, it's my own mean.”